Free Republic

An opinion writer who frequently contributed op-eds to the New York Times has admitted to being paid well by the Iranian mission to the United Nations but insists that this did not make him an agent of the Iranian government or influence his writing. Kaveh Afrasiabi is currently under arrest, accused of violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). For its part, the New York Times, which still claims to publish "all the news that's fit to print," is dummying up, keeping its readers in the dark on the subject, and offering no comment.Ira Stoll of The Algemeiner has the...

@RudyGiuliani : A meeting is coming out in 1-2 days in State Dept. in which Hunter snuck in the back door ... That meeting took place with Tony Blinken."

Hunter Biden wanted to avoid registering as a foreign agent as part of a deal with a Chinese energy company, according to text messages obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. In a message to Tony Bobulinski on May 1, 2017, Hunter Biden also proposed creating a U.S.-based shell company so that the joint venture could bid on contracts with the U.S. government. A day after sending the message, Hunter Biden set up a meeting with his father, Joe Biden, and Bobulinski in Los Angeles. He claims that Joe Biden is referenced as an equity shareholder in early documents for...

China Global Television Network (CGTN) has been identified as a “long-standing weapon in Beijing’s arsenal of repression” whose raison d’être is “to attack designated enemies of the Communist Party,” chiefly the U.S. Headquartered in Beijing, funded by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and controlled by the regime’s Publicity Department, the outlet is inundated with anti-U.S. and anti-Trump content. As a result, CGTN was forced to register with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) in 2019. CGTN’s international disinformation campaign – which has resulted in airing forced confessions and deeply biased coverage of Hong Kong protests – aligns with President Xi...

Newly released documents reveal the FBI never had even preliminary evidence of a Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia, and instead used a rarely enforced statutory relic – the Foreign Agents Registration Act – as the legal rationale for opening investigations in 2016-2017 and surveilling Trump campaign aides. On July 31, 2016, the FBI opened a counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign’s alleged ties with Russia – nicknamed Crossfire Hurricane – not under espionage conspiracy laws but under FARA. The next month the FBI opened four separate FARA cases into people associated with the Trump campaign. Two other FARA cases were...

[Subtitle: “I hope that my story will help you understand the methods of Russian operatives in Washington and how they use U.S. enablers to achieve major foreign policy goals without disclosing those interests,” Browder writes.]The financier Bill Browder has emerged as an unlikely central player in the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Sergei Magnitsky, an attorney Browder hired to investigate official corruption, died in Russian custody in 2009. Congress subsequently imposed sanctions on the officials it held responsible for his death, passing the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government retaliated, among other ways,...

The governmentÂ’s effort to withdraw the departure motion means Flynn can ask to withdraw his guilty plea. Now the prosecutors are changing their tune. The furor over U.S. Department of Justice leaders openly intervening in the Roger Stone prosecution to overrule line prosecutorsÂ’ sentencing recommendation has led some commentators to report that Attorney General William Barr may have played a role in the governmentÂ’s shifting sentencing recommendations for retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn.In FlynnÂ’s case, prosecutors have twice reversed course on their sentencing recommendation. The latest reversal in the governmentÂ’s position, however, was more likely caused by the line...

George Papadopoulos A junior member of the Trump foreign policy advisory team in 2016, George Papadopoulos was approached by FBI agents in Chicago, where he lived with his mother after the election while waiting for what he hoped would be an offer to join the new administration. The agents said they just wanted to talk to him about contacts he’d made with people in London during the campaign. He spoke to them without a lawyer or the benefit of notes, emails or a calendar to refresh his recollection — a decision he would later regret. One of the interviews was...

After a flurry of court filings and blockbuster developments last month, the Michael Flynn criminal case has been dormant for nearly three weeks. The parties and the public now await word from presiding Judge Emmett Sullivan on the pending motion to compel and motion for sanctions filed by Sidney Powell, the lead attorney who took over FlynnÂ’s case shortly after the special counsel team disbanded.PowellÂ’s motion seeks to force federal prosecutors to provide Flynn an array of documents withheld from his attorneys and to sanction government lawyers for their failure to provide relevant evidence to the defense team in...

Full title: Judicial Watch: AP Reporters Gave DOJ/FBI Ukraine Info and Code to Private Locker of Paul Manafort in Apparent Effort to Push Criminal Prosecution Andrew Weissmann organized off-the-record DOJ/FBI meeting with AP to exchange ‘clarification’ and ‘assistance’ in their investigation for details on former Trump Campaign Director Paul Manafort (Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released two productions of heavily redacted FBI documents – 28 pages and 38 pages – about an April 11, 2017, “off-the-record” meeting set up by then-Chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Fraud Section Andrew Weissmann, between the DOJ, the FBI and the Associated Press...

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Tuesday, October 22, 2019 Campaign Fundraiser Agrees To Plead Guilty To Falsifying Records to Conceal Work as Foreign Agent, Evading Taxes on Income Obtained by Lobbying on Behalf of Foreign Entities, and Illegal Campaign Contributions Federal prosecutors today filed a criminal case charging Imaad Shah Zuberi, a Southern California campaign fundraiser, with falsifying records to conceal his work as a foreign agent while lobbying high-level U.S. government officials. The criminal charges allege that Zuberi engaged in lobbying efforts that earned him millions of dollars, most of which was pilfered...

The trial of a former White House counsel in the Obama administration was postponed suddenly on Tuesday amid concerns about the jury selection process. Politico first reported that U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is overseeing the case, announced she may have violated Gregory Craig's right to a public trial by limiting public access to jury selection. Proceedings in the trial began Monday, with opening statements expected to take place Tuesday morning. Politico reported that Jackson thought the trial might have to be postponed to November to find another group to lead jury selection. Politico noted that the process...

Breakthrough – Things Making Sense Now… Lots of things going on in/around the two legal cases involving Michael Flynn today. The origination of the DOJ shift in position involves the indirect case (EDVA) where Flynn is/was a witness in the FARA (Foreign Agent Registration Act) case against Bijan Rafiekian and the Flynn Intel Group. Hat Tip to Techno-Fog for a litany of legal filings assembled today [132 pages here]. This is somewhat complex to explain. The direct case against Flynn (Judge Sullivan court – Washington DC), where Flynn copped a guilty plea for lying to FBI investigators, has a sentencing...

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Monday, May 13, 2019 Court Finds RM Broadcasting Must Register as a Foreign Agent U.S. District Court Judge Robin L. Rosenberg has ruled that a Florida-based company, RM Broadcasting LLC (RM Broadcasting), was acting as an agent of a foreign principal and must register as such under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA).The Department of Justice contended in a civil counterclaim that RM Broadcasting has been acting as an agent of the the Federal State Unitary Enterprise Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency (Rossiya Segodnya), a Russian state-owned...

......"These foreign governments/factions don't just pay bribes to our politicians for favorable policy; they give money to media outlets like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post - and those are only the print media. Also networks take this $. Here's why President Trump is so confidently predicting most of the Fake News media is going to be out of business in just six years: When ad revenues dropped and subscriptions dropped back in the mid 2000's, they discovered a lucrative new revenue stream. Many top Fake News outlets are now very, very dependent on the cash they...

While special counsel Robert Mueller has concluded there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, some of the key people in creating the Russia-collusion narrative themselves have ties to a foreign nation. Both the Democratic National Committee as well as Fusion GPS—the company hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign to research the Trump campaign—were using Ukrainian sources in their efforts to discredit Trump. Serhiy Leshchenko, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, was a common thread involved in Democratic opposition research efforts into former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort. Leshchenko, along with Artem Sytnyk, the...

President Obama's former White House counsel Gregory Craig was indicted on Thursday for concealing information and making false statements to federal authorities in an investigation stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into the 2016 election. Details: Craig, who also served in the President Bill Clinton’s administration, is facing up to 5 years in prison for allegedly lying about his work with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort for the Russia-aligned government of Ukraine. The investigation of Craig is part of a larger crack down on foreign lobbying by the Department of Justice's Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) unit.

The dramatic Tuesday hearing for former national security adviser Mike Flynn didn’t produce a sentence. Instead, Judge Emmet Sullivan gave Mr. Flynn a delay to reconsider his options. I was in the courtroom, and my reading of Judge Sullivan’s treatment of Mr. Flynn (with whom I co-wrote a 2016 book) was rather different from what most reporters have said and written. Judge Sullivan repeatedly invited Mr. Flynn to reconsider his guilty plea on a charge of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Judge Sullivan stressed that he had not presided over earlier proceedings in the case and that he...

Prosecutors from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team can use evidence from a 1980s Department of Justice review of Paul Manafort’s lobbying activities in the former Trump campaign chairman’s upcoming Washington, D.C., trial, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. The same federal judge also pushed back Manafort’s trial date to Sept. 24. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson approved the use of the roughly 30-year-old report, which prosecutors argued is proof that Manafort was long aware of the disclosure requirements under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. He is charged with failing to register as a foreign agent under the FARA.

Federal prosecutors are investigating former lobbyist Tony Podesta, former Rep. Vin Weber, R-Minn., and former Obama White House Counsel Greg Craig, NBC News confirmed, citing multiple sources familiar with the matter. CNN first reported the existence of the investigation. Prosecutors for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York opened the investigation following a referral from the office of special counsel Robert Mueller, the sources told NBC. NBC previously reported that Mueller had been looking into Podesta and his Democratic-leaning lobbying firm as part of its broader investigation into the finances of former Trump campaign chairman Paul...